Pictures at a Revolution (47 page)

Aldrich denied that his intentions in making the movie were explicitly political: “When we planned
The Dirty Dozen
in 1965 do you think for one moment we knew that by the time the film came out the French kids would be in revolt and Americans would be sick of Vietnam so the mood would be just right for our picture? Rubbish,”
⁴¹
he said. But he admitted that the film's climax, in which Brown's character throws bombs down a ventilator shaft and burns a group of trapped Germans alive, was intended to discomfort audiences by evoking the use of napalm. The scene was shocking, in part because almost no Hollywood movie had yet made even an oblique reference to the Vietnam War and in part because Aldrich had found a way to make an audience cheer a lone black man killing a huge group of white people. Jim Brown could have been the embodiment of Stokely Carmichael's declaration in the spring of 1967 that “black people are now serving notice that we'll fight back.”
⁴²

The Dirty Dozen
became the year's biggest box office hit, and its unmistakable Vietnam-era resonance might have gotten more attention had it not opened at a moment when the news was filled with the war at home. On July 12, after John Smith, a black taxi driver in Newark, was seen being physically dragged into a police station after a minor traffic violation, two hundred protesters gathered outside the precinct; the assembly dissolved into an unruly ramble in which store windows were broken and a few Molotov cocktails were thrown. Two days later, state troopers and National Guardsmen moved into the city, an overreaction that was met with escalating violence. By July 17, 1,200 people had been jailed, 600 injured, and 23 killed; H. Rap Brown became famous that week when he called for “guerrilla war on the honkie white man.”
⁴³
The following weekend, Detroit exploded into riots and looting after a raid on illegal gambling dens; another 1,200 people were arrested, and four thousand fires were set. Again, federal troops rolled into the city. Even as President Johnson was increasing the number of American soldiers in Vietnam to nearly a half million, worries about the war were temporarily overshadowed by stories about “the fire this time,” hugely exaggerated reports of property damage (the $25 million of wreckage caused in Detroit was widely reported as $500 million)
⁴⁴
and a storm of “Who says it can't happen here?” editorials.

The poor, angry black man from the ghetto, ready to loot, shoot, and kill, became as much of a focus for the fears of Middle America—and of Middle American media—as the acid-tripping hippies and runaways pouring into San Francisco had been a month or two earlier; and Sidney Poitier, on a press tour for
In the Heat of the Night
, found himself asked again and again to denounce the rioters or ally with them, to identify himself politically at a moment when the ground was constantly shifting. “You ask me questions that pertain to the narrow scope of the summer riots,” he seethed into a bank of microphones. “I am artist, man, American, contemporary. I am an awful lot of things, so I wish you would pay me the respect due.”
⁴⁵
“He was the only black leading actor out there for fifteen years,” said Lee Grant later. “It was a terribly unfair responsibility for him…he was carrying this alone, and it was not a burden that he welcomed.”
⁴⁶

But the relentless call for Poitier to become a political spokesman was also an indication of his growing cultural significance;
To Sir, with Love
was becoming Columbia's biggest hit since
Lawrence of Arabia
, and
Variety
called Poitier “the only Negro which myriads of Americans feel they know and understand…a symbol of the thoughtful, efficient Negro whose technological knowhow (no dropout, he) enables him to help, compete with, and, when necessary, show up whites.” In a season during which the country was “stained by ugly race riots,” the paper said, Poitier was now so popular that if he declines a role, “they rewrite the part for a white actor!”
⁴⁷
Poitier heard that quasi compliment many times in 1967, usually from people who hadn't an inkling of the condescension that was built into it, and generally responded by politely acknowledging that, yes, he had heard that people were saying that, and quickly moving on to another subject. During the press junket for
In the Heat of the Night
, he was barely asked anything about his work; instead, he had to compose answers to questions about whether it was inherently offensive to depict black people in a cotton field in the movie. At one point, he was required to list other talented black actors for an indignant reporter from Boston who didn't believe she knew of any. (Although
I Spy
had been on the air for two years, he had to spell the name “Cosby” for her.)
⁴⁸

When
In the Heat of the Night
opened in New York on August 2, critics, perhaps inevitably, treated the movie as if it had been hatched overnight in response to the long, bloody summer, and most of them approved of what they saw. Although the film had nothing to do with race riots, Bosley Crowther announced that “the hot surge of racial hate and tension as it has been displayed in many communities this year…is put forth with realism and point,” praising “the crackling confrontations between the arrogant small town white policeman…and the sophisticated Negro detective with his steely armor of contempt and mistrust.”
⁴⁹
A number of critics besides Crowther strained to find parallel flaws in Tibbs and Gillespie, unwilling to see
In the Heat of the Night
as anything other than a movie in which the black man needs to learn a lesson, too:
Time
magazine praised it for showing “that men can join hands out of fear and hatred and shape from base emotions something identifiable as a kind of love,”
⁵⁰
and
Life
called it “a fine demonstration that races can work together.”
⁵¹
Pauline Kael liked the film but hated the tone of most of its positive reviews; she had been relieved to discover that Jewison hadn't made a “self-righteous, self-congratulatory exercise in the gloomy old Stanley Kramer tradition” but complained that too many of her colleagues praised it “as if it had been exactly the kind of picture that the audience was so relieved to discover it wasn't.”
⁵²

A few prominent critics dissented strongly. Andrew Sarris's dismissal of the movie as a “fantasy of racial reconciliation”
⁵³
was echoed by
The New Yorker
's Penelope Gilliatt, who was then in a relationship with Mike Nichols and had seen a screening of the movie during production of
The Graduate
. The film, she said, “has a spurious air of concern about the afflictions of the real America at the moment…. There is a predictable night interlude when the rivals suddenly come together and speak for a second of their common loneliness, thus tritely demonstrating that we are really all the same, though I can't think of any really first-rate film, play or book that isn't unconsciously dedicated to the fact that we are all inconsolably different.”
⁵⁴
The most pointed criticism
In the Heat of the Night
received stemmed from the decision Jewison made early in the development of Silliphant's screenplay to strip away scenes in which Tibbs faced the systemic racism of a small southern town and to boil down the movie's racial politics to a single relationship. “Jewison and…Silliphant are running on the premise that movies can correct the world by describing it incorrectly,”
⁵⁵
the critic Ethan Mordden wrote later. And
Esquire
's Wilfrid Sheed remarked, “If that were all Mississippi amounted to it wouldn't take much courage to march down there; one Poitier per town would soon bring the rascals to their senses…. Our peoples will work this thing out some day. Yeah, sure.”
⁵⁶

The vast majority of reviewers weighed in with strong praise for the movie and its two stars, with the
New York Daily News
claiming that “nobody but an actor of Poitier's stature could have characterized [the] Negro detective with any amount of forcefulness”
⁵⁷
and
Newsweek
's Joseph Morgenstern writing that “Poitier, who could be ruling the roost if parts were handed out on the basis of talent instead of pigment, gets a rare opportunity to demonstrate the full sweep of his powers.”
⁵⁸
The
Chicago Sun-Times
and
The Boston Globe
both suggested that Steiger was headed for an Academy Award.
⁵⁹
But Poitier—and what he represented—was also coming under harsher scrutiny. “He is not a Negro before being a man. He is a Negro instead of being a man,” wrote Sarris in the
Village Voice
, dismissing the movie as “liberal propaganda…. Nowadays…Negroes are never condemned in the movies. Their faults, if any, are tolerated as the bitter fruits of injustice, and thus their virtues are regarded less as the consequences of free choice than [of] puppetry…. All that is expected of the Negro…is that he be inoffensive, and Poitier [is] heroically inoffensive…. It is not Poitier's fault that he is used to disinfect the recent riots of any lingering racism. It is his destiny to be forbidden the individuality to say ‘I' instead of ‘we.'”
⁶⁰

Sarris underestimated how unusual
In the Heat of the Night
would look to most moviegoers. Audiences reacted so strongly to the chance to see Poitier fight back, and the politics behind it, that
In the Heat of the Night
soon acquired the jokey nickname “Super-Spade Versus the Rednecks.”
⁶¹
And, as Jewison had predicted, the scene in which Virgil Tibbs delivers a backhand slap to the face of a white racist became a galvanizing moment. “Sidney and I used to go to the [Capitol] Theater in New York to see the scene,” Steiger said later. “You could hear the black people say, ‘Go get 'em, Sidney!' and the white people going, ‘Oh!' And we used to break up. We could tell how many white and how many black were in the theater.”
⁶²
Anthony James, the young actor who had made just $100 a day to play the counterman in a Sparta diner who turns out to be involved in the murder, went to Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles and listened to the gasps. “I have young African American friends who have seen the movie, and they don't really notice the scene now,” he says. “But at the time, it was really startling.”
⁶³

In almost every movie house, the slap drew cheers. “Applause in the movies…seems to have some belligerence in it, an assertion of will,” wrote Renata Adler in
The New York Times
. “People applaud at movies, I think, because they want to insist on seeing more of something…. The enthusiasm for [Poitier's] small act of violence also contains a strong awareness of his real situation. He is playing once again, patiently, angrily, that young Negro…which he has managed to turn, over the years, into a kind of deliberate, type-cast, reverse racial stereotype…. This reinforces the sense of outrage at the abuse which, until the point of the liberating slap, he has had to take in role after role…. The reaction is shock and pure relief.”
⁶⁴

O
h shit,” Arthur Penn said to himself. “Here we go.”

It was August 5, the second day of the 1967 Montreal Film Festival, the Saturday morning after a capacity crowd of two thousand at the Expo Theater had attended the opening night premiere of
Bonnie and Clyde
and responded with laughter, cheers, and clearly heartfelt applause. Penn and Beatty, listening to the response, knew the movie had had exactly the effect they hoped it would. At a press conference, the director calmly fielded questions about the picture's comedy, violence, antiheroism, and “relevance,” all of which had gotten the first-nighters buzzing. “I don't think the original Bonnie and Clyde are very important except insofar as they motivated the writing of a script and the making of the movie,” he told reporters. The film's approach, he explained, was that, at a time when “very rural people were suffering the terrors of a depression…Bonnie and Clyde [became] folk heroes, violators of the status quo. And in that context, one finds oneself…confronted with the terrible irony that we root for somebody…who, in the course of [a] good cause, is called upon to commit acts of violence which repel us.” Penn spoke about the “constant correlative” of humor and bloodshed and explained that as the movie unfolds, “the murders get less and less funny because they begin to be identified with the murderers…. With respect to
Bonnie and Clyde
and my other films…I would have to say that I think violence is a part of the American character.”
¹

After the press conference, Penn saw Bosley Crowther, the
New York Times
critic who delighted in being a kingmaker—and sometimes an executioner—at international film festivals. Crowther had been at the Expo Theater the night before, and he was appalled; the audience's enthusiastic reaction and Penn's pro-insurrection rhetorical flourishes in front of reporters had only affronted him more. “He sort of warned me that he was really going to attack it,” says Penn, “and I thought, well, here it comes.”
²

Bonnie and Clyde
was scheduled to open in New York City on August 13—a Sunday—but Crowther couldn't contain his wrath even for a week. Immediately after Penn's remarks, he filed a dispatch that ran in the
Times
the next day. “Hollywood moviemakers seem to have a knack of putting the worst foot forward at international film festivals,” he began. “Now they've done it again.”
Bonnie and Clyde
, he fumed, “whips through the saga of the cheapjack bandits as though it were funny instead of sordid and grim.” And while he sullenly acknowledged that most of those in attendance had liked the movie, “some more sober visitors from the United States,” whom he did not identify, “were wagging their heads in dismay and exasperation that so callous and callow a film should represent their country in these critical times.”
³
Five days later, Crowther went after the movie again, claiming it had sullied the festival for him and was even tarnishing the image of Expo 67. “Was the audience reaction a true expression of appreciation for the film or…a sort of rocking along with a form of camp?” he wondered.
⁴
By the time he filed his official review on opening day, his indignation had swollen into outrage.
Bonnie and Clyde
, he wrote, “is a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy that treats the hideous depredations of that sleazy, moronic pair as though they were as full of fun and frolic as the jazz-age cut-ups in
Thoroughly Modern Millie
.” He called the performances “ridiculous, camp-tinctured travesties” and said he found the violence “as pointless as it is lacking in taste.”
⁵

Crowther's displeasure with the film came as less of a surprise than the ferocity and persistence of his attacks on it. After twenty-seven years on the job, he was a staid traditionalist with a harrumphing aversion to anything he found “sensationalistic” and a particular distaste for violence that went unpunished on screen. As far back as
The Killers
in 1946 and
White Heat
in 1949, he chided Hollywood for its eagerness to make movies about criminals and worried that the industry's emphasis on “malevolence” and “sadistic thrills” would generate “unhealthy stimulation”
⁶
in moviegoers, whom he viewed as an impressionable and easily corrupted stratum of consumer society. In the month before
Bonnie and Clyde
opened, the success of
The Dirty Dozen
had shocked Crowther; he called Aldrich's movie “astonishingly wanton…a studied indulgence of sadism that is morbid and disgusting beyond words.”
⁷
And he had been equally horrified by two other recently released films that demolished the tradition of the western as thoroughly as
The Dirty Dozen
had upended the war-movie genre. Sergio Leone's
A Fistful of Dollars
had opened in Europe in 1964, and its sequel,
For a Few Dollars More
, had followed in 1965. But only in the last few months had the films, which introduced movie audiences to TV cowboy Clint Eastwood, reached the United States; in 1967, United Artists released them in rapid succession in order to build an audience for the third picture in the series,
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
. Crowther had little fondness for moral ambiguity; he felt that Leone's movies, which featured Eastwood as a gunslinger who keeps his allegiances to himself and which UA's executives crowed “made money beyond all our hopes,”
⁸
were “constructed to endorse the exercise of murderers” and offer “fantasies of killing contrived…for emotional escapism.”
⁹
Shortly before
Bonnie and Clyde
's opening, he wrote a column called “Movies to Kill People By” that began, “Something is happening in movies that has me alarmed and disturbed. Movie-makers and moviegoers are agreeing that killing is fun.” He concluded by calling
The Dirty Dozen
and the Leone pictures “as socially decadent and dangerous as LSD.”
¹⁰
One of the last reviews he filed before leaving for Montreal to see
Bonnie and Clyde
was a pan of Roger Corman's
The St. Valentine's Day Massacre
, which had beaten Penn's film into theaters by just a couple of weeks and which, he wrote, “artificializes and confuses the tawdry history it is supposed to relate.”
¹¹

In person, Crowther, according to his colleagues at the
Times
and his contemporaries in movie criticism, was a mild, soft-spoken gentleman, not lacking in perspective or a sense of humor. But in print, huffiness and sanctimony would often get the better of him. “The film critic is performing a function akin to a pastor—he is a counselor of a community about the values of a picture,” he told Richard Schickel, then the reviewer for
Life
. “[
Bonnie and Clyde
] is immoral, and we have to say so.”
¹²
Unfortunately for Crowther, whenever he took umbrage at something, his prose, which was never smooth to begin with, would gnarl itself into incomprehensibility. “He was very amiable,” says Joseph Morgenstern, who was then beginning his job as
Newsweek
's movie critic. “But he was a know-nothing, fuddy-duddy, Puritan, turgid writer. Remember Arthur Krock, the
New York Times
columnist? There was a joke that nobody ever finished reading a whole Arthur Krock column. The same could have been said of Crowther, although he was immensely powerful, and people did read far enough to know what he thought.”
¹³

In 1967, the opinion of
The New York Times'
film critic didn't represent the last word on a movie, but it did tend to start the conversation, and Crowther's triple attack on
Bonnie and Clyde
was especially damaging because it echoed the contempt in which Jack Warner and Ben Kalmenson already held the movie. If they had been indifferent to its fate before, the
Times
certainly offered no reason for them to change their minds. And Crowther was hardly alone in his assessment;
Time
magazine handed the assignment of critiquing
Bonnie and Clyde
to its music reviewer, Alan Rich, who snidely dismissed Beatty's “long-unawaited debut as a producer” as “a strange and purposeless mingling of fact and claptrap.”
¹⁴
When it first opened,
Life
didn't bother to review it at all. Even Andrew Sarris, a champion of the Nouvelle Vague films that had inspired the screenplay in the first place, had mixed feelings about the movie, saying it “oscillates between the distancing of period legend and the close-ups of contemporary psychology.”
¹⁵
“Sarris's review, which was not good, was very smart,” says Robert Benton. “He said, this is a self-conscious movie, and he was right to note that the New Wave had created a kind of self-consciousness that would mark the American films that were about to come out. But it was a pretty devastating time.”
¹⁶

When Joe Morgenstern went to Warner Brothers' Fifth Avenue screening room to watch
Bonnie and Clyde
for
Newsweek
, he was rattled to find Beatty sitting in the back row next to him. “I felt that he was trying to peer at my notes,” he says. “It was a little unnerving, but that's not really an excuse.” Morgenstern went back to his office and filed what he called a “pissy” review,
¹⁷
in which he wrote that although the movie had “interesting” elements and “some beauty, suggestions of humanity and even some legitimate humor,” it devolved into “a squalid shoot-'em-up for the moron trade…
In Cold Blood
played as a William Inge comedy.”
¹⁸

“I got it wrong,” he says. “I was not ready for the violence and kind of shrank from it.” Morgenstern didn't give much thought to his piece after he filed it; “however upset or disoriented I had been by the movie,” he says, “in my mind, that was all the more reason for me to move on.” But as Friday approached, Morgenstern found himself suggesting to his wife, actress Piper Laurie, that they see it in a theater. “She looked at me kind of peculiarly and said, ‘I thought you didn't like it.' This was on the weekend—my review wouldn't be published until Monday. And I said, somewhat illogically, ‘Well,
you'll
like it—the costumes, the Flatt and Scruggs music….' We went to see the movie that afternoon, and the audience just went crazy. It had a big crowd, despite Bosley Crowther's review. I just got this cold sweat on the back of my neck and thought, ‘Oh shit, I've missed the boat.' I turned to my wife, who loved it, and said, ‘Do you have anything to write with?' and she found a pad and pen, and I started frantically taking notes. I suddenly realized what I had missed.”
¹⁹

Morgenstern was too late to prevent his review from running, but that Monday, when it hit newsstands, he walked into the office of
Newsweek
editor Osborn Elliott, told him with a nervous attempt at casualness that he had “some other thoughts” on
Bonnie and Clyde
, and asked him if he could write about it again. “The only thing I was thinking about at that point was digging myself out of a hole that I'd fallen into. I was a deeply troubled soul that week. I thought I could get away with just a reconsideration, not a retraction. But I started to write, and I was as blocked as I've ever been. And then I thought, ‘I've gotta come clean.' And I wrote the lead of the new piece.” A few days later, Morgenstern and Laurie had dinner with Pauline Kael, who was then working on a long article about the movie for
The New Republic
, where she had been freelancing recently. “Pauline wasted no time in telling me smugly, ‘You really missed the boat,' and I said, trying my best to imitate her smugness, ‘Well, I may have more to say,' already knowing what I had written.”
²⁰

“Last week this magazine said that
Bonnie and Clyde
, a tale of two young bank robbers in the 1930s, turns into a ‘squalid shoot-'em-up for the moron trade' because it does not know what to make of its own violence,” Morgenstern's second review began. “I am sorry to say I consider that review grossly unfair and regrettably inaccurate. I am sorrier to say I wrote it.” Morgenstern went on to praise “scene after scene of dazzling artistry…[that] has the power to both enthrall and appall.” The film, he wrote, “makes a cogent statement…that violence is not necessarily perpetrated by shambling cavemen or quivering psychopaths but may also be the casual, easy expression of only slightly aberrated citizens, of jes' folks.” And the movie's audience, he added, was “enjoying itself almost to the point of rapture.”
²¹

Morgenstern's mea culpa—“my Andy Warhol moment,” he says wryly
²²
—was infinitely more valuable to
Bonnie and Clyde
than a mere rave would have been: Suddenly the studio had a controversy it could exploit. “After the first set of reviews, I thought, it won't even last a week in theaters,” says Robert Benton. “But when Joe Morgenstern changed his mind, that pivoted it. It made news—and from there, the movie started to have a life of its own.”
²³
When
Bonnie and Clyde
first opened, Warner Brothers had run an ad with quotes from the critics who had seen the film in Montreal and liked it—Judith Crist, whose enthusiastic recommendation had gotten the movie into the festival in the first place and who wrote about it for
Vogue
, Gene Shalit in
Ladies' Home Journal
, and
Cue
's William Wolf. (The film also drew support from an unlikely quarter: “It works,” wrote the reviewer for the
Catholic Film Newsletter
. “You can say it should not. You can insist it does not decide what it is: semidocumentary, ballad, love story, social comment, comedy, psychological study or tragedy. But it works.”)
²⁴
But now the studio had something juicier to sell—a movie that had made a critic think twice.